Someone doesn't seem to have a lot of confidence in this book. It's tiny - you could fit it in your trouser pocket - there's no price on the cover, I've never heard of the publisher, and it was posted to me from, unusually, Jamaica. I couldn't work out what the cover image was for a while, but eventually deciphered it as a rather rude black-and-white close-up of a woman eating a Mars bar.

What that has to do with a bunch of film reviews written for (mainly) the New Statesman and the Telegraph in the 1990s, I'm not sure. And what, you may ask, is the point of reading a bunch of 1990s film reviews, never mind from which publication?

For two main reasons. The first is that they're very good. I'll get back to this. The second is that the films being written about are almost all ones you will have seen yourself, and so you may care to clash opinions with Anne Billson not just for the sake of it, but to partake, retrospectively, of a kind of commonality all too missing from popular culture these days.

But you can't beat a good film review. It is one of the most rewarding of the critical disciplines - perhaps the most (pace Nancy Banks-Smith), as more people go to the movies than read books. Guardian readers are blessed in having one of the finest practitioners of the craft writing for them; and if you like reading Peter Bradshaw on contemporary cinema, then you'll like reading Billson on what was - eight to 18 years ago - also contemporary cinema.

Not that she is unaware of her responsibilities. "I think the function of film reviews," writes Billson in her introduction, "is principally to allow me, the writer, to be opinionated and obnoxious . . . to miss the point of the film entirely, go off at a tangent, and make everyone wish they were reading Pauline Kael instead."

In these tasks she fails dismally. Billson gets the point of the films she sees; her digressions, few though they be, are always relevant and amusing; she is never obnoxious; and though she is, as all critics have to be, opinionated, I thought of Kael only once, and that was something along the lines of "why do women make such good film critics - or is that in itself a sexist observation?" Her New Statesman reviews tend, perforce, to take a feminist line more than her Sunday Telegraph pieces. Then again, her review of Basic Instinct for the Statesman correctly dares to laugh to scorn the very idea that the film is unfair to women or gays. She says, instead, that the film is unfair to Michael Douglas.

A good film critic isn't one you never disagree with, but one who makes you notice something about the film that you had spotted only subliminally. Of Bill Murray's character in Groundhog Day, she observes that "he ends up doing good deeds because he has exhausted all the alternatives", which very nicely points up that film's acidic edge. Of Indecent Proposal, she writes: "in all the discussion the film has generated, no one has mentioned that the most indecent thing is that Redford offers his million bucks not to the woman, but to her husband." And as for the celebrated mass kilt-lifting scene in Braveheart, she says: "This is the only instance I can recall of a Hollywood epic paying homage to Carry on Up the Khyber."

As you can see, she's on the ball, and funny with it. She understands instinctively the populist heart of movies - Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey is warmly commended (and she has the odd grumble at the Modern Review, as well she might, having discovered its schtick some years before it did) - but she also knows her oignons about Chabrol and Rivette, and indeed many other directors of art films I have either hardly or never heard of. (As a result of reading her assessment of it, I now particularly want to see Patrice Leconte's Ridicule

But for the most part, you are getting a series of joyously executed reviews, by a clear-eyed yet passionate commentator, of films that, perhaps surprisingly, have lingered longer in the mind than you might have thought, at the time, that they would.